Daniel Levitin Short Quotes

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We may have had music before we had a word for it.

Daniel Levitin
An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making.

Daniel Levitin
Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs

Daniel Levitin
The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others.

Daniel Levitin
Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability.

Daniel Levitin
On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.

Daniel Levitin
The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities.

Daniel Levitin
The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.

Daniel Levitin
The coming together of rhythm and melody bridges our cerebellum and our cerebral cortex.

Daniel Levitin
Memory is fallible... not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations.

Daniel Levitin
Fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work.

Daniel Levitin
No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.

Daniel Levitin
Music has been a shaping force... music has been there to guide the development of human nature.

Daniel Levitin
Another possibility is that evolution selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness.

Daniel Levitin
When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.

Daniel Levitin
In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.

Daniel Levitin
Consonant intervals and dissonant intervals are processed via separate mechanisms in the auditory cortex.

Daniel Levitin
Miller and his colleague Marty Haselton at UCLA have shown that creativity trumps wealth, at least in human females.

Daniel Levitin
We can say that speaking French "runs in families," but I don't know anyone who would claim that speaking French is genetic.

Daniel Levitin
Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change.

Daniel Levitin
Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information.

Daniel Levitin
Mozart had extensive training from his father, who was widely considered the greatest living music teacher in all of Europe at the time.

Daniel Levitin
Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found.... Music predates agriculture in the history of our species.

Daniel Levitin
The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

Daniel Levitin
The information age has off-loaded a great deal of work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us.

Daniel Levitin
The six types of song that have shaped human nature—friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love songs—I've come to think are obvious...

Daniel Levitin
Evolution doesn't design things... The brain is... like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction.

Daniel Levitin
Contour refers to the pattern of musical pitch in a melody—the sequence of ups or downs that the melody takes—regardless of the size of the interval.

Daniel Levitin
In songbirds, it is generally the male of the species that sings, and for some species, the larger the repertoire, the more likely it is to attract a mate.

Daniel Levitin
Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality.... that is a feature of the musical brain.

Daniel Levitin